Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education – Ideas and Writing on Knowledge Gathered for the First Time

by Henry David Thoreau, J. Parker Huber

"It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know," Thoreau wrote. Ideas about education permeate Thoreau's writing. Uncommon Learning brings those ideas together in a single volume for the first time.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching, Philosophy, Classics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."

Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.

More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...

http://thoreau.eserver.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....

http://www.biography.com/people/henry...

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. I love Walden, too, but this book is a collection of his quotations on education and other topics. It includes quotes from Walden and all his other works. I didn't always like how the quotes were presented in no particular order (chronological or thematically), but they are all inspiring. Now how to put it into practice?

[Em Ponders · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."

[Alyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read slowly as the summer slammed into winter without an autumn this year.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry David Thoreau (born 1817) was an influential philosopher best known for his writing on civil disobedience. This book gathers together his thoughts on education. Thoreau believed strongly in the “active mind”, a testament to lifelong learning and curiosity where education is not just a means to an end but is intrinsically valuable. He also pushed for education where book learning is always paired with hands-on learning and believed educators should serve not as conduits of information but as prompts for individual thought and processing. I found a lot of what he had to say inspiring and interesting! That said, I get the impression that Thoreau was probably a bit tiresome in real life. He was sometimes an extremist and the book includes a few rants about the uselessness of non-intellectual books and how wasteful it is to do basically anything but grow your mind through deep thought. All said, I marked so much in this book to keep thinking about and I especially enjoyed the introduction by Martin Bickman.

[Jessica Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

How is it that I could read this easily, yet SUFFERED through Walden..